Ideation Process Blog
Sketching
This week in studio we focused on ideation, more specifically brainstorming through sketches. We had multiple ten-minute sketching sessions, in which we tried to make ten or more sketches. The idea is that increasing the number of sketches increases the number of good ideas. We sketched freely at first and then were constrained to the topic of garbage, which forced us to focus our thinking. We also explored the design concept of divergence and convergence by first drawing many different ideas, then drawing many variations on one of them. This approach allows for a good balance of diversity and depth in ideas. Outside of studio, we utilized this approach to brainstorm on the topic of cleaning, sketching ten different ideas and ten variations on the best one.
Sketch Quality
We were repeatedly reminded during studio that the artistic quality of our sketches did not matter, but I am not sure if my sketches were detailed and clear enough. The goal of these sketches is simply to get ideas on paper, so it does not matter if they are sloppy, but there is a fine line between an understandable but messy sketch and an indecipherable scribble. In the future, I will have to find a balance that allows me to draw my ideas quickly but clearly.
Was there anything that frustrated you about this project?
I was frustrated by how useless all my ideas seemed. Everything I thought of either already existed or had a good reason not to exist. I think this may be because ten sketches is not enough to explore the possibilities; had I come up with 100 ideas, there would have been more good ones. I think I may have been too critical of my ideas during the sketching process, which can hinder creativity.